In Which I Blog About Etsy, Crafting, Fandom and Anything Else that Keeps My Brains Busy

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Daily Sketch: Sif Stage 1

Head asplody today, so not so much talk. Sorry.

But here's the picture!

I may have mentioned elsewhere that I like drawing long hair. And no one has better hair than Sif! She was one of many Norse godesses of fertility. Her hair was the color of ripening wheat, and its lenght and health reflected and possibly shaped the prosperity of the fields on Earth.

I am not so fond of the color yellow, but I am going to be drawing Sif a LOT, just based on past experience. Oh yeah.

Ooh, and also! She was Thor's wife, which means she must have had endless entertainment. This was a guy who could be made to drink seawater with the old "bet you can't!" line of reasoning. I tend to believe the only reason Sif didn't run around causing just as much trouble as Loki was because she had Thor right there to mess with. Well, and two little kids. That probably took up some time.

Tilt: Do you really want a dissertation on the signifigance of blonde hair? Too bad! Here goes!;)Sif's hair, along with many other fertility spirits, is described in crop colors- "the gold of ripe wheat", most often. And blonde hair is pretty fragile; anyone with long, healthy blonde hair was no doubt the result of a good steady diet, and so reflected the health of their local economy. People being big on patterns, and not so good with causality, this was often seen as a reverse cause-and-effect: people with long blonde hair go with lots of food, so they must CAUSE lots of food! Yeah! One would expect this to be somewhat less prominent in cultures where blond hair was the result of a nutritional deficiency, and thankfully it is...but not always entirely absent, since the color association is so tempting. But in these cases, it's like golden eyes or green skin, meant to emphasize an otherworldly nature. For those groups where blonde hair does occur naturally, blonde hair is most often found in very young children; this likely leads to its association with innocence. Some studies show that even now, juries are more likely to find naturally blond defendants not guilty!This unfortunately also leads to the association of blonde hair with stupidity, or at least ignorance. The bleach-blonde phenomenon does not help with that. There is also some unfortunate overlap with racism, in the stupid-polack category; many ethnic groups associated with such jokes (Polish, Swedish, rural white Americans) are more likely to skew blond. As racism fades in American society, it's easy to forget that those jokes once had real venom. I recommend Jacob Riis' "How the Other Half Lives" for an example of how "white" people were evaluated in the good ol' days.

Ahem.

Well, you asked, sort of.:p

Witchy: I do like the warmer shades of yellow. And there's a certain marigold/banana yellow that, paired with blue, makes a wonderful kitchen look. But after reading the Yellow Wallpaper story, I could never have it in my house. Yes, I am impressionable.